The subject application is directed generally to rendering of documents, and more particularly to rendering of documents having a static portion and a dynamic portion, such as with forms. It will be appreciated that the subject application is applicable to any document rendering wherein two or more portions are combined electronically to form a single document output.
Electronic documents are typically generated by an application, such as a word processor, drawing package, or graphical design package. While a myriad of software applications exist, some of the more popular, currently available applications include the Microsoft Office products and products from Adobe Systems, including Adobe Acrobat. Electronic documents are frequently output in a page description language (“PDL”), which is typically formed from instructions that describe a layout of a corresponding image.
Electronic PDL documents must be decoded in order to be printed or viewed. Hard copy output, such as with a printer, will typically require a decoding of PDL into a bitmapped image during a rendering process, including raster image processing. The conversion from PDL into bitmap can require considerable processing. This can be particularly problematic when a series of documents must be output, such as when filling and generating forms.
A typical form generation operation would begin with a static form, typically in a PDL format. Supplemental content completing the form would be also accomplished by addition to or alteration of the PDL form content. Once completed, the entire PDL document needs to be converted to a bitmapped image. It will be appreciated that for many forms, such as generation of mass mailings, invoices, or any other repetitive document generation task, considerable processing time is required to convert each PDL document to bitmapped form.
An alternative to the forgoing operation is to generate and store a bitmapped image of the static form content. Supplemental information is then bitmapped, and then added as an overlay to the static form bitmap. While this operation avoids rendering of the static form content for each output, it requires substantial storage since bitmapped renderings are typically very large, especially for high resolution or multi-color documents.
It would be advantageous to have a system and method that eliminates the need to fully decode and rasterize PDL associated with static form content for each output, while also avoiding the substantial storage requirements for reusing bitmaps.